According to the United States Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an estimated 2.3 million construction workers, or 65 percent of the construction industry, work on scaffolds. Additionally, many jobs include elevated worksites other than scaffolds. Protecting these workers from elevated work site-related accidents may prevent some of the 4,500 injuries and over 60 deaths every year in the United States.
For this reason, Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations requires fall arrest systems for workers that work on scaffolding or at certain heights. Fall arrest systems are meant to aid in safely stopping a person that is already falling and can come in the form of general fall arrest or personal fall arrest. Fall arrest does not necessarily translate into fall protection.
Several different fall arrest systems exist, such as railings, safety nets and various forms of lifelines, for example, a full body harness and lanyard.
When someone attached to one of these lifelines falls, the lifeline stops the person at a certain distance. This distance can be controlled by the length of the lanyard to prevent the person from hitting the ground. Lifelines require an anchor, and/or an extensive array of overhead safety wires to provide for the attachment of full body harness lanyards above a work site, and workers have to work around the lanyard as they move. By its intrinsic nature, the full body harness with lanyard actually applies a horizontal component to the restraining force in most circumstances, which pulls the worker toward pipes or structure as it arrests his fall. Additionally the lanyard must extend about six feet in arresting the workers fall, allowing his torso and head to pass between the pipes or structural elements that he is working on as his fall is arrested, so often times a worker that is saved by the fall arrest system will still suffer injuries, particularly head injuries, as a result of hitting obstacles during the fall. Some of these injuries may be fatal. While effectively arresting the fall, this type of fall arrest system does not provide effective fall protection.
The lanyard system also requires retracing steps, back to the overhead attachment point, and reattachment to the next overhead lanyard attachment point.
In addition, the elderly and similar persons are prone to slips, stumbles or falls while walking; or those for whom such a spill is likely to cause serious injury, like head injuries, broken bones, cuts, bruises or contusions.
In addition, firefighers are caught in a backdraft, where conditions provide fresh oxygen to a fire causing it to explode back at fire fighter in a flash or other swiftly developing situations that a fire fighter would not be able to react to in time.
In addition, H2S kills workers in oil producing wells and producing facilities.
In addition, asbestos is a carcinogen that infects unsuspecting victims who are unaware of this hazard.
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.